Healthcare providers are often faced with treating patients for one type of physiological condition while monitoring at least one of a host of physiological parameters. It is often necessary to deliver various medications to patients in order to control these physiological parameters. Monitoring and controlling multiple physiological parameters for a plurality of patients requires a great deal of time and resources from healthcare providers. With ever increasing shortages in healthcare staff, workloads have been shown to be directly proportional to an increase in the occurrence of errors in medication delivery. Errors in medication delivery occur more frequently than commonly known and many of the errors are life threatening. In addition, these errors often go undiscovered and/or unreported.
Numerous physiological conditions are monitored in hospital care settings, including glycemic state, blood clotting, and the overall physiological stability of the patient. Typically, however, healthcare providers will measure only one physiological parameter, such as glucose level, prothrombin time, blood flow, hemoglobin level, heart rate, blood pressure, arterial oxygen concentration, or other cardiac output to treat the specific physiological condition under examination. Based on this measurement or a series of these measurements, the provider delivers medication to the patient in order to stabilize the physiological parameter and thus treat the physiological condition.
The control of glucose levels in seriously ill patients has proven to be a significant problem. Hyperglycemia is a frequent consequence of severe illness, occurring in both diabetic and non-diabetic patients, due to altered metabolic and hormonal systems, impaired gastrointestinal motility, altered cardiac function, increased catecholamine production, altered hepatic gluconeogenesis, relative insulin resistance, and increased corticosteroid levels. Symptoms associated with elevated levels of blood glucose include dehydration, weakness, greater risk of poor healing and infection, frequent urination, and thirst. Infusion of insulin has proven an effective method for treating hyperglycemia. However, insulin infusion without proper glucose level monitoring can lead to problems with hypoglycemia.
Visually distinguishing one medication from another can be difficult in many circumstances. Syringes and other containers have standardized sizes, and various liquid medications may look identical. Printed labels frequently become the only mechanism for determining that the medication installed in a pump or other delivery device is that intended. If a label is misread, health consequences to the patient can be severe.
The potential for error is compounded when a treatment application allows or requires delivery of multiple substances. The attending healthcare provider must then handle multiple potentially conflicting medications simultaneously, identifying and installing them without error. When this process is repeated frequently and for numerous patients, this burden of perfection becomes daunting.
One particularly sensitive application involves counterbalancing treatment. Such applications use opposing biologics in parallel to reinforce the body's innate “push-pull” mechanisms, raising or lowering certain biological levels as needed. Examples of this include regulation of serum glucose using insulin and glucose as mentioned above, vasodialation using a vasoconstrictor and vasodialator, and clotting using a coagulant and anticoagulant. Were opposing biologics to be reversed, such treatment could act to exacerbate imbalances in proportion to their magnitude, rather than correct them. This effect may be difficult to detect at small imbalance levels and escalate to a runaway effect, placing the patient in significant danger.
In addition to the considerable health hazards, errant medications can also be incompatible with delivery apparatuses. For example, a pump must exert a certain force on a fluid to displace an intended volume. A fluid with viscosity beyond expectation or pump tolerances could be dispensed in incorrect amounts and possibly damage the pump mechanism.
Thus, there exists a need for a physical system and method that acts to ensure that the medication container installed is that which is expected for the particular treatment application.